1st Edition
Short Stories for Social Research Exploring the Possibilities of Social Fiction
List of Contributors
Acknowledgement
Introduction by Cecile H. Sam and Ane Turner Johnson
Part 1: Short Stories to Conceptualize Research.
1. “Ethical Mindfulness and the Decision to Use Social Fiction as Method/ology,” by Cecile Sam.
2. “Postmodernism, Situational Mapping, and The Prisoner,” by Ane Turner Johnson.
3. “This is a Truth about Canada: Making Mindfully with Indigenous-Settler Relations,” by Anita Sinner.
Part 2: Short Stories for Data Collection and Analysis.
4. “Guilty Bi Association: Queering Bildungsroman & Short Story as Researcher Reflexivity” by Nathaniel Smith.
5. “Playing the Death Game: Comics-Based Social Storytelling in Preschool Ethnography,” by Sally Pirie.
6. “How Educational Technologies Interpellate Neoliberal Subjects (and how AI will make that even better),” by Jan Dickey, Sang-hyoun Pahk, and Colleen Rost-Banik.
7. “Traditional Cultural Camp as an Effective Environmental Research Methodology: Learning Reflections from Kâniyasihk Cultural Camp, Saskatchewan, Canada.” by Kevin Lewis, Ranjan Datta, and Jodi Houle.
Part 3: Short Stories as Product.
8. “Lavonne Richardson, DEI Administrator Extraordinaire, and the Use of Social Fiction as Testimony,” by Sosanya Jones.
9. “I am…Hippolyta: How Speculative Fiction Calls this Black Woman Teacher into a Currere Conversation.” by Dowan McNair-Lee.
10. “The Death of Woke, The Revival of Justice: Biopower and Resistance in Educational Policy” by Jarrett Gupton.
11. Epilogue: “Don’t Ignore the AI in the Room” by Cecile Sam and Ane Turner Johnson.
Biography
Cecile H. Sam is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Rowan University, USA. She explores faculty work, academic leadership, and the shifting contours of higher education in the techno-modern era. Her current projects focus on the ethical dimensions of faculty life, leadership, and the ways technology reshapes our understanding of education. Across her writing and teaching, she foregrounds story as a critical lens for exploring how power, ethics, and identity intersect in academic contexts.
Ane Turner Johnson is Professor of Educational Leadership at Rowan University, USA. As a scholar of international education, her research traces the entanglements of policymaking, governance, and (neo)colonial resistance in African higher education. From exploring refugee students’ deployment of cultural heritage to documenting epistemic disobedience among faculty, her work champions qualitative, decolonial approaches that disrupt the dominance of neoliberal and positivist research regimes in education.
